[GRLUG] multiple login on Mac

[Robar Philip]

On Jan 8, 2012, at 5:03 PM, Bob Kline wrote:

> I wasn't sure of the detailed reasons, but Open Solaris never got much traction.
> Linux came on fast and furious about that time.

Linux was mature well before the open part of Open Solaris, but it’s true that Open Solaris never really caught on as a community.

> Solaris was a wonderful OS, if less so than the original BSD, but it never
> developed much of an outside community of developers and users, and
> too it was never clear where Sun wanted to go with it, or what it would
> ever put in to it. There seems to be no game at all now that Oracle owns
> Solaris.

Considering that the first generation of Solaris (a.k.a. SunOS) was BSD, that’s an interesting claim. :-) 68K/SPARC/SunOS was the successor to VAX/VMS as the primary target for open source software. It was the dominant UNIX. It is still the basis for literally billions of dollars of enterprise computer hardware and software sales. There’s little if anything that you can do on Linux that you can’t or couldn’t do on Solaris, but the reverse isn't true—especially from an enterprise standpoint. In particular Linux, to the best of my knowledge, still does not scale anywhere near as well Solaris when it comes to symmetric multi-processing (SMP, not clustering).

> My sense is that file systems are a dime a dozen today, and every
> so often one has some advantages over what exists.

ZFS is a fundamental step forward over other file systems and volume managers in terms of both simplicity of deployment and reliability. BtrFS will takes years to reach the same level of features and reliability.

> The same with languages and compilers.

(I will not start a language war. I will not start a language war. I will not… :-)

So tools don’t matter? Really?

You might find Paul Graham’s, “Beating the Averages”, interesting reading. It’s a short article on how Graham and Robert Morris used Lisp in their startup, Viaweb, to outrace and out-innovate their competitors. (Viaweb was bought by Yahoo and became Yahoo Stores*.) [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html]

Also, if you follow this type of thing, you’ll have noticed that there’s been a marked increase in the use of functional programming in the commercial world over the last few years. (Think Lisp, Erlang, Haskel and Scala—particularly the latter.)

Programming languages do matter—if you’re smart enough to take advantage of them.


Phil


* Yahoo, of course, then proceeded to rewrite much of Yahoo Stores because they couldn’t hire enough smart people** to continue development in Lisp.

** The journey-person programmer thinks they understand C, but really doesn’t. (And let’s not get started on the nightmare that is C++.) On the other hand a language like Lisp in the hands of a true master can create things of exceeding beauty, complexity and reliability in a fraction of the time you could do them in C, if you could do them at all.


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.